Vincent Gordon Harding

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Vincent Gordon Harding, American civil rights activist and historian (born July 25, 1931, New York, N.Y.—died May 19, 2014, Philadelphia, Pa.), was the author of one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most-powerful speeches (variously known as “Beyond Vietnam” and “A Time to Break Silence”), given on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. The hard-hitting manifesto attacked U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Following the assassination of King in 1968—exactly one year after the date of the speech—Harding lamented that the polarizing content of the address might have been the motivation for the shooting. In addition to Harding’s involvement in black studies as the first director of what became the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, he also documented the civil rights movement in such volumes as There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981), which chronicled black protest in the U.S., and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996). The scholarly Harding earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York City, and a master’s and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, and he taught at various universities. His service (1953–55) in the U.S. Army resulted in his adoption of a pacifist stance and membership in the pacifist Mennonite faith. Harding served as a consultant on the Emmy Award-winning TV series Eyes on the Prize (1987 and 1990), an exhaustive two-part documentary on the American civil rights movement.